MIT Gives Away Its Knowledge for FREE

MIT is stepping to the front by making their scholarly articles available to the public. They will be available through an open source platform DSpace, a scholarly repository for over one-thousand organizations (if you have a favorite University, i.e., Notre Dame or USC, check to see if it’s listed here). MIT’s corner is called DSpace @MIT.

DSpace@MIT’s Open Access Articles collection contains over 1800 scholarly articles that MIT Faculty have made openly available on the web. Additionally, MIT Thesis Collection contains selected digital theses and dissertations from all MIT departments dating as far back as the mid-1800s. Since 2004, all new Masters and Ph.D theses have been added to the collection after degrees have been awarded. Browse the collection here.

MIT analysis of usage statistics for last fiscal year indicates that content was downloaded by end-users over 15.2 million times or, on average, at a rate of over 41,000 files per day (credit: MIT).

Why do they do this? Maybe it has something to do with what Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science ad chair of the Ad-Hoc Faculty Committee on Open Access Publishing, said:

“Scholarly publishing has so far been based purely on contracts between publishers and individual faculty authors.In that system, faculty members and their institutions are powerless. This resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals.”

2 thoughts on “MIT Gives Away Its Knowledge for FREE”

This is incredibly interesting. I remember being in college and feeling it was unfair that only someone with a student ID could access all this priceless knowledge. I hoped that one day everyone would get a chance to access it. I guess that day is coming soon! Thanks for sharing.

I agree. Olin. I’m quite impressed with MIT. The public colleges should follow suit. It’s this sort of forward thinking attitude that will level the playing field. Thx for dropping by. BTW–I love your blog. Lots of good info on it.

About Me

Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular "Building a Midshipman", the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. In her free time, she is editor of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer.

Contact Info

Writer’s Wisdom

"Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
- Mark Twain
"There are three rules to writing a novel, but no one can agree what they are." W. Somerset Maugham

Search

Categories

Do you like what you see? Please Donate

Follow me!

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.